Necessity
is the mother of both invention and social progress in Hidden Figures, an engaging and inspiring story pulled from a
lesser-known passage of a page of history. The film follows three women, all of
them African-American and employees at NASA's Langley Research Facility in
Virginia during the early 1960s. They excel in their respective fields, and they
become firsts in those fields, too, because, as one of the women puts it to a
judge who will decide her professional future, somebody has to be. Somebody has
to stop the cycle that's summed up as such: "That's just the way things
are."

That
sense of both necessity and inevitability runs throughout these stories. The
women begin in unenviable positions, stuck on the underground level of a
building that's half a mile away from the facility's main building. The room is
assigned for "colored computers," whose work is checking the math for
the facility. Their assigned tasks are picked up and dropped off every day. This
is treated as some sort of favor to the group by the white woman who oversees
the computing department, but when one of our protagonists ventures into a room
other than the one that has been assigned to them, the looks on the faces of
most of the white men and women tell another story.

The
first such look, as well as the first glimmer of hope, comes from a state
trooper. Katherine Goble (Taraji P. Henson, good in general, although "playing smart" a
bit too much), Dorothy Vaughn (Octavia Spencer, who is solid but, unfortunately,
left with the least to do of the major characters), and Mary Jackson (Janelle
Monáe, a force of assertive matter-of-factness) are stuck on the side of the
road on their way to work. Their car has broken down, and before Dorothy can fix
it, the trooper arrives with his lights swirling. There are suspicion and
accusation in his voice, until the women say they work at NASA. The tone and
conversation quickly change (the Russians, Sputnik, the astronauts as the best
the United States has to have, and "We have to beat those Commies"),
and soon enough, the women have a police escort for their drive to work.

This
scene represents the pragmatically sunny outlook of the screenplay by Alison
Schroeder and director Theodore Melfi (based on Margot Lee Shetterly's book).
Hearts and minds aren't changed by big speeches, philosophical arguments, or
even legal decisions (Virginia continues to segregate schools during this
period, despite the Brown v. Board of
Education ruling). Here, prejudice is overcome through routine, daily
encounters, as the people on the side of power slowly realize the common ground
and shared ideals to which they were blind.

Katherine's
proficiency with analytic geometry lands her a temporary job checking the math
in the Space Task Group, which manages manned space flights—or, in 1961, the
proposed and hypothetical ones. The Space Race is on, and the Soviet Union
continues to hold a significant lead. Her new boss is Al Harrison (a very good
Kevin Costner), who treats all of his employees—regardless of their gender or
skin color—as semi-irritating but necessary components of a greater cause. The
goal is to get an American in space.

Meanwhile,
Dorothy, whose boss (played by Kirsten Dunst) repeatedly denies her an
opportunity for a promotion, takes it upon herself to learn how to program and
operate NASA's new, room-filling data-processing machine, and Mary tries to
enroll in night classes so that she can apply for a job as an engineer with the
organization. For both of these two women, their qualifications keep coming up
short, no matter what they do, on account of things being the way they are or
suddenly important addendums to the employee handbook.

The
prejudice on display in the film is subtle, quiet, and all-encompassing: the
assumption that Katherine is a janitor, the boss' plea that Dorothy not
"embarrass" her, the stunned looks on her co-workers' faces when
Katherine dares to fill her mug with coffee from the community's pot. After the
coffee "incident," a new kettle, labeled "colored," suddenly
appears in the office. Adding insult to injury, nobody bothers to fill it. If
she needs to use the restroom, she has to dash the half-mile back to her
previous office area, because it's the only place on the campus where there's a
bathroom she is allowed to use.

Once
the obstacles of racial discrimination within the facility have been overcome,
Katherine still has to contend with the ones in regards to her gender.
"There's no protocol," after all, for a woman's presence in important
briefings.

The
progressive advancement within the facility is born out of necessity. It's the
realization that the organization needs these women, who are at the top of their
fields or put in the time and effort to place themselves there (Dorothy studies
the coding of the new data-processing unit, making her the only person in the
facility who actually knows how to operate it). The astronauts in
particular—and especially the man who will be the first American to orbit the
Earth John Glenn (Glen Powell)—don't care about race or gender, as long as the
numbers that their lives depend upon are correct.

The
screenplay fleshes out the dynamics within NASA incredibly well, and the
struggles of these three women within a specific professional culture and
society at large are conveyed with equal insight (Their personal lives, however,
come up short, with Katherine going through a routine romance, Mary occasionally
debating politics with her husband, and Dorothy having only one scene with her
children). Hidden Figures is transparent in its methods of evoking inspiration and
encouragement, yes, but it's also a significant story, told well and with
feeling.